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Advice from a mill man re you trying to sharpen your turning tools on a bench grinder with a wheel so hard and fine that the slightest touch of steel burns a blue spot of drawn temper? You can't turn without sharp tools and you can't keep them sharp that way. Find a mill supply house (most cities have at least one in the phone book) and let them help you select a good sharpening wheel. I'd suggest a Norton #32A60-J5VBE or a Universal-Simonds #RA60-J-VS in a size to fit your grinder. These are soft wheels and should never be used for anything except sharpening hard steels. Your good wheel will last longer if you put a harder, general-purpose wheel on the other end of the grinder, and use it for rough work. You won't get a good edge if your tools bounce around, so it's important to keep grinding wheels round and true and free of vibration. This is easily done with a star wheel or a diamond-tipped truing tool, or even with a piece of broken grinding wheel. The star wheel will give you the best surface. If you don't have a regular grinder, you can make one by in the sky, but my 40 years of mill experience has shown that a $1.19 Crystolon pocket stone plus a couple of hard Arkansas slip stones will do a very acceptable job. The pocket stone bites off the required amount of metal, then the finer Arkansas stone smooths and polishes. For these fine stones I'd sug- ' gest a Norton #HS-3, which has a tapered cross section with round edges, and a Norton #HF-S43, which is diamondshaped in section with sharp edges. These three stones will also do nearly all of your carving tools. To touch up gouges, make a socket of some sort for the Honing: butt end of the handle, to steady it while you hone. Hold the tool firmly between your left thumb and fingers so you can rotate the gouge easily while stoning with your right hand. To keep stones clean and free-cutting, keep them moist at all times. Make a shallow tray from the bottom of a large tin can. Put a few layers of cloth in th� bottom, saturated with a mixture of half kerosene and half motor oil. Stones can't absorb too much oil, and it makes metal particles picked up by R. Perry Mercurio, of Kingfield, Maine, is a retired plant engineer in the commercial woodturning industry. Tenon sizer rigging up a stand, either of wood or of angle iron, whose top is a comfortable elbow height. Mount pillow blocks on the stand, then fix the grinding stones to the shaft and power it with a separate motor and V -belt. There are as many ways of honing as there are stars Some sizing tips: by R. Perry Mercurio the stone during honing loosen and shed. Hang an old towel nearby to wipe fingers and chisel. Duplicate turnings can be made faster by laying Out their profile on a strip of masking tape along the tool rest, with parting-tool CutS indicated by double lines. Diameters for each Cut can be noted right on the tape. If you make duplicate turnings having a tenon on one or both ends and you have trouble keeping tenon size uniform, make a simple sizer. Choose a hard block of maple or hornbeam and turn a �-in. shank on one end to hold in the lathe's chuck. Turning this block by its shank, bore a hole in the end that's a little larger than the desired tenon size, and a little deeper than the tenon is long. If you don't have a drill bit the correct size, you can grind a drill bit slightly off-center-then it will bore a slightly larger hole. Make a Ys2-in. by Ys2-in. counterbore at the front end of the bore to help start the tenon into the hole. Remove from the lathe and remove wood off one side until you break into the bore with a gap about X in. wide. Using a piece of old scraper blade, plane iron or whatever, make a flat knife as shown in the sketch at the lower left and attach it to the sizer with its cutting edge just behind the center of the gap. If you rough out your tenons to within Ys2 in. of size, this tool will align and finish the job accurately. Mount the sizer in the lathe chuck, and set the lathe to about 500 RPM. Hold the work in your left hand, and advance it with the tailstock crank. If you occasionally need a few dowels of an odd size that can be made by turning down a larger dowel, you can make a fixture to do just that. If you are starting with, say, a �-in. dowel, bore an oversized �-in. hole through the center of a I-in. by 3-in. by 12-in. hardwood block. Next, to support a gouge, glue and screw a smaller strip of hardwood OntO the first one, with its upper edge along the centerline of the �-in. hole. Lay a Va-in. or �-in. gouge on top of this second strip, with its cutting edge overhanging the edge of the hole. Fashion a wood clamp as shown in the sketch, below right, to hold the gouge in place. Mount a �-in. dowel in your lathe chuck, and insert the free end in the fixture hole. Run the lathe at slow speed and gently push the fixture along until it reaches the headstock. You don't need the tailstock, JUSt support the free end .of the dowel with your hand to keep it from whipping around. You'll have to fiddle a bit to find the gouge setting that produces the dowel diameter you want. For a high gloss, the old shellac finish is still ex- Finishing: Adjust gouge for desired diameter Support block Clamp Center hole in support block. 91